Yum - Indian Curry

So one of the best things about college was I could guiltlessly purchase package foods because (a) I was supposed to be spending all my time on my studies, not on cooking and (b) I had points that I had to spend. But in the real world all those tasty vacuum sealed pouches of Indian curry are really expensive. So I christened my range this evening and tried my hand at homemade curry. Here is the recipe:

1/2 bunch chopped mustard greens (can use any cookable greens, including bok choy!)
8 oz tomato sauce
1/3 c plain yogurt
1 small onion
1 tsp chopped giner
1/4 tsp cumin
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 can kidney beans

Steam the greens for 3 minutes. Saute the onions in vegetable oil until soft. Add the ginger and other spices and cook for 2 minutes. Add the greens, beans, yogurt and tomato sauce to the pan with the onions and cook until it looks like curry from a bag. Next time I might add some more spice - coriander? pepper? - but it was pretty good.

Warning: This is vegetarian food.

How I was confronted with yuppiedom, but escaped (almost) unscathed

Given the heat I've given up running until mid-September, when the locals claim it cools down. I've been working out at the Tumbleweed Rec Center, the city run community center, but someone there suggested that I try out Lifetime Fitness, a private club in nearby Gilbert. Both are equidistant from my place so I gave it a shot on Friday.

Let me tell you, I thought these places only existed in movies (and NYC, where nothing is too ridiculous). This place has a spa, a cafe, televisions and leather sofas in the locker rooms and three water slides. Tile and mirrors and spritey employees are everywhere. The main gym is an endless floor of machines, and people looking absolutely miserable on them. People never look that happy at the gym, but the sheer mass of sweaty, unhappy faces says something about misplaced American ideals, not to mention energy. It makes our society look so...mechanical, and removed from nature.

But, off my soapbox. I may be too classless (and too poor) to join Lifetime Fitness, but luckily my classlessness allows me to guiltlessly take advantage of the free seven day trial membership. And so today, after working out on the floor of the sweating dead, I lounged by the outdoor pool, reading and listening to the satellite radio piped in pool side.

This is why I'm hot

I just passed the bank, which reported the temperature at 112F. Note that it is 5 o'clock. I try to keep my heat-related moans to myself, but when they do escape, the general response is, "You ain't seen nothin' yet, Kid".

Today's T-pain fix

For a good laugh watch this episode of infomania starting at about 10 minutes, until 12 minutes (or longer - its all hilarious). Shout out also to people who specialize in packaging and those who like weird print media.

Great One Liners

My mom left the following message on my phone: I just wanted to congratulate the new owner of a creepy mattress.

Backstory: I was on the hunt for a mattress for the cheap, but, as we had discussed, new. I spent all of Thursday morning driving around trying to find places that sell mattresses, but I kept getting lost because everything looks the same here, and stores are all those semi-circular strip malls, so you can't see anything from the road. After driving in and out of strip malls for three hours I had only one quote from a very smooth businessman who (a) asked me if I was single and (b) tried to sell me a vera wang mattress. Vera Wang makes mattresses? How do you show that off? Who wears mattresses to cocktail parties?

As a last ditch effort I went out to Mesa, and managed to locate a mattress liquidator because there was nothing else around - easy to see from the street. The windows of the business where all blacked out and I considered calling my mom before I went in, so the police would know where to find me when I went missing. Inside was just a big cavernous warehouse with mattresses stacked along a narrow walkway that lead to a backdoor. When I told him what I wanted the salesman lead me out the backdoor, where there were rows and rows of those metal self storage units. While he opened one and threw a few mattress on the ground for me to try out, he informed me that his competitors always talked shit about him, but he had been in business for 14 year and had a 5 star rating with the better business bureau.

To which I replied,whatever, if you can install me a queen bed for under 500, I'm yours. And, I slept like a baby on my brand new queen bed last night.

I thought of you when

The foil label on my fat free plain Stonyfield organic yogurt told me to check out this movie: Food Inc.

Today on the Travel Channel

Anthony Bourdain, famed chef, traveler, eater, and frequent guest judge on Top Chef traveled to Columbia and sampled some intense food! Unfortunately I didn't see anything vegetarian among the things he was eating, but there were vegetables in and among the meat products. The most interesting thing I saw on the show was young people (about our age or a bit older) speaking about how 10-15 years ago the drug cartels ran their neighborhoods and no one could go anywhere without danger. Now Columbia, in less than 15 years, is a country transformed. The young people said it was a change in the hearts of its people that helped Columbia heal and prosper so soon.

The Travel Channel also had a great parody of a prescription drug advertisement. The commerical directed people who had symptoms of "the travel bug" to ihavethebug.com where they could find a community of support. I think I have something like "the travel cough" lingering but not serious.

Target Women

I'm lying on my new living room floor, surfing the web until stores open so I can go buy a mattress. I just viewed the newest release of Target Women, a short show that pokes fun at advertisements directed towards women. It is very funny and at times anger inducing, at those chauvinistic advertisement companies that try to convince us, for example, that a perfect load a laundry is all we need to have a great day. Check out the rest of the series by searching for Target Women on you tube.

I also thought of you when

First, let me say that there are still forthcoming entries from my side of our trip to Oh My Cod!

Second, I watched that video yesterday, for the first time. All I have to say is T-pain better give you back your T-pain glasses.

In other news: Today I have been going through my huge pile of stuff that I moved home from our house (23 Vine aka The Batloft). In the depths of that pile, among hundreds of scraps of paper from college and high school, I found a holiday card I wrote to you in junior year. It even had a stamp on the envelope. Highlights from that card: crossing out hannukkah and respelling it hanukkah; referencing our epic Grinch-watching; acknowleding that "I've finally met someone I'll always refer to as 'my close friend I met in college'"; and writing the epic post-script "I'll meet you in baggage claim!"

I'll save the card for you if you want it. It has a cute picture of sock monkeys in christmas hats on the front.

Another card I found was from my friend Tim. The first line of it reads, "To be honest, I have no idea when your birthday is."

I thought of you when...

Why have we not seen this video? Possibly the only thing that could have made senoir week better.

NY to AZ Day Five

After arriving in Santa Fe Wednesday afternoon, we spent the day here not driving. First thing I did in the morning was go for a run, although I didn’t heed the altitude as I should have and thus spent the rest of the day slightly ill (Santa Fe is almost 7,000 feet above sea level.) That didn’t stop me from visiting two bookstores and the public library, however. Between the two bookstores I made a good start on my collection of southwest themed books: Roadside Geology of Arizona, Shrubs and Trees of the Southwest Desert and Tony Hillerman’s autobiography. I also picked up a book by J Maarten Troost, who is one of my favorite travel writers.

As per Sam’s instructions ("if you do one thing in Santa Fe, have coffee at the Aztec Café"), my mother and I walked to the Aztec Café for a late lunch. I knew I was in the right place because I could hear Atmosphere playing before we stepped through the café door. I had a yummy Ithaca style salad – baby greens, carrots, tomatoes, onions, and sunflower seeds – and great headache erasing coffee. Right next door to the café was the bookstore where I picked up Hillerman’s autobiography, as well as some artsy greeting cards.

After an afternoon of true lounging I walked downtown – 10 minutes from the TravelLodge on Cerrillios – I highly recommend the TravelLodge for price, location and comfort if you are ever in Santa Fe. Downtown was a little high end and touristy for my tastes, though I did lust after all the silver and turquoise jewelry. (I didn’t start my collection of said jewelry, but I know its just a matter of days before the bangles and earrings start seriously calling my wallet’s name).

At night we sat on the Plaza and listened to live music coming from balcony of a nearby resturant. The PLaza was also the location where, earlier that day, an old native american had sat down on the bench next to me and told me horror stories of baking in Phoenix in the summer. Lovely.

NY to AZ Day Four

We just stopped at a town outside of Clinton, OK for gas and I had my first run in with misunderstanding accents. It took a few tries for me to purchase my bag of ice. We’re nearing the Oklahoma/Texas border. The grass is thinner and browner, and much of the soil is a deep, rusty red. I got very excited because I saw my first cacti on the red banks of the exit ramp – little round guys with long thorns. There are slight hills here but in places you can see for miles and miles into the distance. The most common sights are cows, hay bales and oil wells. The cows must be beef cows because they are often far from the nearest visible farmhouse, that is, too far to be milked twice daily.

Nine out of ten of the radio stations are country music or right wing talk shows, but we always able to find at least one good classic rock radio station. These radio stations naturally have a country bent, and, interestingly enough, I have heard a large percentage of songs that are sampled on Night Ripper or Feed the Animals, both Girl Talk albums. I suspect that I will end up listening to a lot of country music living down in Arizona.

Shortly outside of Oklahoma City we passed a town that had at least fifty large wind turbines. Mom went crazy with excitement, and we rolled down the windows to see if we could hear them, although, naturally, at 70 mph the wind going by the car would have drowned out any wind going through the turbines. We were a bit depressed having just spent the night in a run down box store heaven outside of Okla City, where there were no sidewalks and freeways everywhere one looked, so it was nice to see that there are progressive people outside of the normal enclaves of liberals that dot the east and west coasts.

NY to AZ Day Three

Currently on the road in southern Missouri. We left Evansville, IN at 7:30 this morning, earlier than we had planned because bad weather was predicted – tornadoes had been sighted the day before - and we hoped to outrun twister. We hit some bad thunderstorms, but the sky is now bright blue. The scenery here is beautiful, and serves as evidence that we are finally creeping into the southwest: the air is drier, the trees are getting shorter and the bushes scrubbier, and lots of fields of yellow and purple wildflowers. Its quite windy. There isn’t much by way of sights to see out here except for cows, a lot of advertisements for fireworks at warehouse prices and super touristy things like wax museums and Six Flags.

The one exception are caves like the Meramec Caverns, the main attraction of the Meramec River Valley which we drove through. Originally a potassium nitrate mine discovered in the 18th century, the caves are now a tourists attraction due to visually stunning mineral deposits. The man who discovered many of the caverns, Les Dill, was also one of the first to use bumper stickers, or bumper signs as they were known in the mid 20th century. When visitors toured the caverns he gave them free bumper signs to attach to their cars, thereby promulgating knowledge of the caverns all across the United States. Due to the proponderance of caves - over 6,000 are surveyed in the state - Missouri is known as the 'cave state'.

NY to AZ: Day Two

Naturally, the first place we visited this morning was the Lexington Public Library. I would live here (in the library) in an instant. There are five floors of books! in a great windowy building that looks over downtown and over the various little parks and horse statues that dot the downtown area. There is also a five story Foucault pendulum that tells the time (pictured below), and a coffee shop. Seriously, I don't need to go to Phoenix. I have everything I want right here.



Later

No one should be surprised that I bought three used books from the library book sale in the basement. The sale, by the way, is the second best library book sale I have ever seen (the one in Ithaca is hands down the best, although this one is open year round.) We then visited with my mother's uncle Ray, and I gave him a copy of my thesis, the third chapter of which profiles him and his work on the reproductive physiology of sheep.

We took 64 out of Lexington. The route is an official scenic highway and we were treated first to the rolling hills of bluegrass country and next to the flat cornlands of the the bread basket. We hit several flash rainstorms, and then my mother pointed out that we were in tornado country, which brighten our respective moods to no end. I tried to restore the mood by stating - with no real certainty - that tornado season didn't start until later in the season. With the luxury of the Internet I have now determined that I was wrong. Tornadoes peak in the southern states in the spring and in northern states in the summer. Tornadoes are rated on a scale from F0 to F5, rated from least to most damage incurred, but a historic tornado in Oklahoma City, which we will pass through on Wednesday, has a rating of F6. Just something to help me sleep easier at night.

NY to AZ: Day One

Eleven hours in the car. We woke up at 5:30, and I stayed awake for the beginning of the drive so that I could bid adieu to all those topographic features that will be absent in Phoenix: hills, trees, greenery. I took over in Ohio, where we drove through Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati, in that order. Right outside of Cincinnati, a great iron bridge spans the Ohio River (?) and the OH/KY border. We spent eleven hours in the car today, thankfully the longest driving stint we'll have to endure this trip.

We Know How to Vacay Part II

Our track record for bars visited didn't come close to book locales (see below). We visited two bars, three if you count the Dog Bar.

We Know How to Vacay Part I

We were on Cape Cod for three days and three nights. The weather was dismal; on the other hand we didn't have to pretend we wanted to lay around on the beach the whole time. Instead we did what any group of 20-somethings do on their vacation: visit public libraries and bookstores. We hit two libraries, three bookstores, and one library book sale and one thrift shop that stocks books. Score.

Cape Cod

Our first act as college graduates was to dispense with responsibility and run off to Cape Cod for a few days. As we're both moving West this summer we thought it would be nice to have a true New England, blue blood vacation before we left. We spent the first two nights at the Isaiah Clark House Bed and Breakfast in Brewster, and the third night in Chatham. Above is the Isaiah Clark House dining room, and below is Sam excited about coffee and Anna trying to look like she fits into a 19th century sitting room.